Filler: Beginnings

So: will be off to Prague tomorrow, and back on Friday. Don’t expect blogging; do expect expertly timed filler. The filler this time: excerpts from the tedious autobiography of yours truly, tentatively titled “Holy Shit, My Navel is Dirty: Reflections On Being Uninteresting”.

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Everyone thinks they’re special, and the asshole way to finish this sentence would be, “but I know I am”.

I don’t know any such thing; I don’t even think that, all that often. I don’t notice many people like me around; then again, I am not all that perceptive or easy to perceive. Knowing my own habits, I wouldn’t notice myself being around.

Ah well.

*

I was never an inquisitive kid, and this is not an interesting story.

I was a curious kid, that much is true: but that was book curiosity. Picture books about life in the Stone Age; all-text books on the everyday existence of the ancient Romans and the armor of medieval knights. Three Investigators books with the silhouette of Hitchcock on the cover, and stories of a dreamland called California inside, a place where there was a secret base in a junkyard, and improbably young kids had driver’s licences and the licence to roam free.

But I did not have the kind of inquisitive curiosity you see on TV, where a gang of kids roams actual physical places they’re maybe not meant to see.

For the first thing, for that you’d need a gang of kids. I don’t mean I was lonely; I’ve just never felt that need for the constant company of other people that most others seem to have. I’m an introvert; it’s not that I always dislike company, but that it exhausts me, rather than energizing me. I had — have — two siblings, a brother two years younger than me, and a brother three years younger. I’ve never felt the age difference to be significant: sure, we were in different schools, different environments, but it never came to one of us not “getting” something because of our ages.

Or maybe it came to that; like most people, I’ve forgotten 99.9% of my childhood. Of yesterday, too.

Because I was the oldest, I was the first to go into everything. I didn’t feel prepared, usually; there didn’t seem to be books about useful things like “the details of the lower high school” or “how to tell a girl you’re kind of in love with her”.